Sex and age specific effects of chromosomal regions linked to body mass index in the Framingham Study

摘要

BackgroundPreviously, we reported significant linkage of body mass index (BMI) to chromosomes 6 and 11 across six examinations, covering 28 years, of the Framingham Heart Study. These results were on all individuals available at each exam, thus the sample size varied from exam to exam. To remove any effect of sample size variation we have now constructed six subsets; for each exam individuals were only included if they were measured at every exam, i.e. for each exam, included individuals comprise the intersection of the original six exams. This strategy preferentially removed older individuals who died before reaching the sixth exam, thus the intersection datasets are smaller (n = 1114) and significantly younger than the full datasets. We performed variance components linkage analysis on these intersection datasets and on their sex-specific subsets.